Web giant coming back

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce requests an explanation from the web giant about the recently discovered illegal data gathering of confidential Wi-Fi data. And, according to the recent reports, Google had already sent an answer in response to the agency’s inquiry.

Information was deemed inadequate

Google stated that they could not inform the government agency about the number of networks to which they kept all the payload data. They also could not provide the accurate information regarding the number of users or homes that were badly influenced by the reported activity.

The search engine company told the committee that they started installing the antennas into their Street View vans for the collection of Wi-Fi data during the latter part of the year 2007. And, these were fixed on all of the cars owned by Google during the first part of the year after. Data gathering ended in May of this present year while the privacy row also intensified.

Different kinds of data were drawn together

Various data were collected by the Street View vans and these include the SSID, MAC addresses, data rate, signal strength, encryption process, and the broadcast channel. The purpose for this data collection was to do advancements on the precision of the location-based services of the company.

Mistake was inevitable on Google’s part

The web giant insisted that it was a mistake on their part that the illegal gathering of the payload data occurred. In addition, the event could not happen because their system continuously changes five times per second. Another defense for this incident is the constant movement of Google’s Street View vans and this shows that it is impossible that they collected anything greater than the small pieces of information.

No invasion of privacy is possible

The search engine confirmed that their company has not done any examination so as to learn anything about the truth of the matter. Also, the payload data were only accessed just about two times. The first one was done by the engineer who was also responsible for creating the code and the second was done as a part of the company’s study.

As Google wrote in their letter, their company already removed all the data that were gathered in the following countries: Ireland, Austria, and Denmark. This was done in response to the demands coming from the security authorities of the said regions. The data collected in US were still stored by Google since there is still a pending legal action.

The company stated that they are now revising their methods of data collection so as to avoid any similar events from taking place.